The Silver Lime of the Villa Garden

This small park was somebody's garden, designed by Leonard Springer. That is all the register says about it, and it is enough to change how the place reads. Springer laid out estates, cemeteries, arboreta and the Leijpark on the other side of town, and he also took private commissions from people building villas. A garden of that kind was made to be walked in by one family. This one ended up as public ground, which is the usual fate of a nineteenth century villa garden in a city that grew past it. The lime is from that planting, banded 1880 to 1890. Silver lime was a favourite of designers in exactly this period, because it does something no other large tree does: the white-felted undersides of the leaves make the whole crown pale and unsettled whenever there is wind, so a single one placed against darker trees lifts a composition without any need for flowers. So look at it as a piece of design rather than as a specimen. It is standing where a professional put it, for a reason he could have explained, in a garden whose owner is long gone and whose gate is now open to everyone.